Michael Cohen exits the U.S. District Court Southern District of New York on April 16, 2018.

When the stakes are high and time is of the essence, judges are often reluctant to rule from the bench. They’d much rather adjourn for the day, retreat to their chambers, and at least have some time to reflect on the facts and the law before making someone’s life miserable. U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood, a three-decade veteran of the federal courthouse in Manhattan, was having none of that. During a too-long-by-half hearing in the fast-moving case of Michael Cohen — Donald Trump’s personal lawyer and errand boy now under criminal investigation — she ruled on the spot on two matters that have captured America’s imagination.

The first one, and the one that grabbed all the headlines, had to do with the mystery of whether Cohen is even a lawyer at all. Very early on Monday, following accusations by federal prosecutors that he’s no more than a glorified strategist and business dealer for Trump — meaning he’s not a real lawyer and thus not entitled to invoke attorney-client privilege over private communications and records the FBI seized from him — his own lawyers filed a court document with Wood disclosing that Cohen does, in fact, have some legal clients.

Cohen told the court that since Trump won the White House and he quit the Trump Organization to focus on a solo practice, he’s had three clients in all: the president, disgraced Republican fundraiser Elliott Broidy, and an enigmatic, “unnamed client” who, Cohen’s lawyers insisted, would be embarrassed and suffer harm if his name became public.

The client, who turned out to be Sean Hannity, had instructed Cohen to not dare make his identity public. But Cohen’s legal team cited no law or authority for that proposition — that somehow the attorney-client relationship allows a lawyer to keep his client’s identity a secret during the course of a legal proceeding. Instead, Stephen Ryan, Cohen’s lead attorney, pointed to some atmospheric “appearance of fairness” standard to protect Hannity from becoming the talk of the town, plus some weak-sauce legal-ethics rules. Not good enough. That’s “not in accord with the law in this circuit,” Wood chastised Ryan. Later in the hearing, she offered a stinging rebuke of his team’s misuse of precedent: “It’s not that you’re bad people. It’s just that you’ve miscited the law at times.”

Desperation setting in, Ryan offered a compromise. “I can give you the name right now in a sealed envelope,” he told Wood, as if attempting to keep it from the public record as long as possible. But that was still not good enough: “I am directing you to disclose the name now,” Wood ordered. Hannity’s name had barely left the lawyer’s lips when those gathered in the courtroom and in an overflow room nearby let out either a gasp or a laugh — or both. The moment was so surreal, it may go down as one of the finest courtroom reveals in the history of the Southern District of New York, which already has quite a history as it is. The Fox News host, for his part, is reportedly not taking the disclosure well.

What’s remarkable about the Cohen case, which in the span of a week has consumed Trump and his longtime fixer, is that it’s not even a real criminal case to begin with — at least not in the traditional sense. Because federal prosecutors are still conducting their investigation and have yet to file charges, the case is known informally by the controversy that kicked it all off: In the Matter of Search Warrants Executed on April 9, 2018. That was also the subject of Monday’s hearing, which was designed to weigh whether Cohen and Trump, who last week was given permission by Wood to intervene in the dispute, are entitled to stop the U.S. Attorney’s Office of the Southern District of New York — an arm of the federal government — from sifting through files contained in Cohen’s lawyer files, electronic devices, a safety-deposit box, and other effects. That’s the second issue Wood was called to rule on.

Mind you, the government got its hands on all this stuff through lawful methods. That means that for each location searched or smartphone seized, federal prosecutors had to convince a federal magistrate judge that there was probable cause to believe that Cohen was engaging in criminal activity and that only through furtive execution of search warrants — as the Feds did with an early-morning raid of Paul Manafort — would the government would be able to gather evidence and build its case. The implication being that any other, more solicitous investigatory method, or a heads-up to Cohen that he was under investigation, would’ve driven him to withhold or even destroy vital evidence. The element of surprise helped federal agents do their work without compromising the larger probe.

Nobody other than federal investigators knows what Cohen may be trying to hide. But if Stormy Daniels’s visit to the Manhattan federal courthouse on Monday signals anything, it is that there’s a strong likelihood that Cohen’s questionable methods in setting up clandestine hush payments to women who claim to have gotten intimate with Trump may have broken a few federal laws. And if somehow Cohen coordinated any of this activity with then-candidate Trump to benefit him electorally but without duly reporting it to the Federal Election Commission, more laws may have been broken.

Because evidence of criminality between lawyer and client renders meaningless any claim of privilege between the two, it shouldn’t matter that it’s the nation’s chief executive trying to claim its protection. “The only thing that makes this case unusual is that one of the clients is the president,” said Thomas McKay, the assistant U.S. attorney sticking it to Cohen and Trump. To McKay, this case is just like any other white-collar investigation involving shady lawyers and clients, where courts have found that federal prosecutors may rummage through their private communications, using special procedures, if it is shown that the discussions were nothing but scheming and conspiring to break the law — no carve-outs for presidents. “If that is true,” McKay warned, “then that is true in every single case.” Which is to say, any third party who learns that their lawyer’s office has been raided would be able to challenge the raid in federal court and drag out sensitive law-enforcement investigations. Now that would be unprecedented.

Neither Trump nor Cohen got away with it. Wood denied both of their motions to allow them, and not the prosecution, to screen the seized material for privileged content. “You’re not going to take away what the government has,” Wood declared. She later suggested that the side with the better argument — and maybe even reputation — was the government lawyers she’s seen in action in her courtroom for the past 30 years. “I have faith in the Southern District U.S. Attorney’s office. Their integrity is unimpeachable,” she said. Wood did ask the government to hand over copies of everything in its possession to the other side so that they could all together come to an agreement “efficiently and speedily” as to what is and isn’t fair game for prosecutors to use in their potential case against Cohen. Down the line, she may even appoint a neutral arbiter, also known as a special master, to sift through all the documents.

And since all of this will take time, Trump and Cohen did win a little: They managed to put the brakes ever so slightly on the government’s aggressive moves against one of the president’s closest advisers. This may only be a Pyrrhic victory in the end if what prosecutors have on Cohen is truly damning — or if it’s proven that very little of his client work is really legal client work. Whatever the case, rest assured that the mere fact that Trump felt the need to retain counsel in this case, just as he struggles to find a decent criminal-defense lawyer to guide him in the broader Russia investigation, should give you a sense of where his priorities lie.

Promoted links by Taboola

THE FEED

27 mins ago

And yet we keep waiting

As we anticipate the end of Mueller, signs of a wind-down:-SCO prosecutors bringing family into the office for visits-Staff carrying out boxes-Manafort sentenced, top prosecutor leaving-office of 16 attys down to 10-DC US Atty stepping up in cases-grand jury not seen in 2mo

For Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers, the practice of charging to upgrade a standard plane can be lucrative. Top airlines around the world must pay handsomely to have the jets they order fitted with customized add-ons.

Sometimes these optional features involve aesthetics or comfort, like premium seating, fancy lighting or extra bathrooms. But other features involve communication, navigation or safety systems, and are more fundamental to the plane’s operations.

Many airlines, especially low-cost carriers like Indonesia’s Lion Air, have opted not to buy them — and regulators don’t require them. Now, in the wake of the two deadly crashes involving the same jet model, Boeing will make one of those safety features standard as part of a fix to get the planes in the air again.

… Boeing’s optional safety features, in part, could have helped the pilots detect any erroneous readings. One of the optional upgrades, the angle of attack indicator, displays the readings of the two sensors. The other, called a disagree light, is activated if those sensors are at odds with one another.

Boeing will soon update the MCAS software, and will also make the disagree light standard on all new 737 Max planes, according to a person familiar with the changes, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they have not been made public. The angle of attack indicator will remain an option that airlines can buy.

Attorneys for New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and more than a dozen other defendants charged in a Florida prostitution sting filed a motion to stop the public release of surveillance videos and other evidence taken by police.

Attorneys filed the motion Wednesday in Palm Beach County court. The State of Florida does not agree with the request, according to the filing.

In the motion, the attorneys asked the court to grant a protective order to safeguard the confidentiality of the materials seized from the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, and “in particular the videos, until further order of the court.”

Two years in, White House aides are dismayed to discover the president likes lobbing pointless, nasty attacks at people like George Conway and John McCain

But the saga has left even White House aides accustomed to a president who bucks convention feeling uncomfortable. While the controversies may have pushed aside some bad news, they also trampled on Trump’s Wednesday visit to an army tank manufacturing plant in swing state Ohio.

“For the most part, most people internally don’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole,” said one former senior White House official. A current senior White House official said White House aides are making an effort “not to discuss it in polite company.” Another current White House official bemoaned the tawdry distraction. “It does not appear to be a great use of our time to talk about George Conway or dead John McCain. … Why are we doing this?

When Mr. Trump was running for president, he promised to personally stop American companies from shutting down factories and moving plants abroad, warning that he would punish them with public backlash and higher taxes. Many companies scrambled to respond to his Twitter attacks, announcing jobs and investments in the United States — several of which never materialized.

But despite Mr. Trump’s efforts to compel companies to build and hire, they appear to be increasingly prioritizing their balance sheets over political backlash.

“I don’t think there’s as much fear,” said Gene Grabowski, who specializes in crisis communications for the public relations firm Kglobal. “At first it was a shock to the system, but now we’ve all adjusted. We take it in stride, and I think that’s what the business community is doing.”

There’s no specific stipulation that Milo must be heard, so it could be worse

President Trump is expected to issue an executive order Thursday directing federal agencies to tie research and education grants made to colleges and universities to more aggressive enforcement of the First Amendment, according to a draft of the order viewed by The Wall Street Journal.

The order instructs agencies including the Departments of Education, Health and Human Services and Defense to ensure that public educational institutions comply with the First Amendment, and that private institutions live up to their own stated free-speech standards.

The order falls short of what some university officials feared would be more sweeping or specific measures; it doesn’t prescribe any specific penalty that would result in schools losing research or other education grants as a result of specific policies.

Tech companies say that it is easier to identify content related to known foreign terrorist organizations such as ISIS and Al Qaeda because of information-sharing with law enforcement and industry-wide efforts, such as the Global Internet Forum to Counter Terrorism, a group formed by YouTube, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter in 2017.

On Monday, for example, YouTube said on its Twitter account that it was harder for the company to stop the video of the shootings in Christchurch than to remove copyrighted content or ISIS-related content because YouTube’s tools for content moderation rely on “reference files to work effectively.” Movie studios and record labels provide reference files in advance and, “many violent extremist groups, like ISIS, use common footage and imagery,” YouTube wrote.

The cycle is self-reinforcing: The companies collect more data on what ISIS content looks like based on law enforcement’s myopic and under-inclusive views, and then this skewed data is fed to surveillance systems, Bloch-Wehba says. Meanwhile, consumers don’t have enough visibility in the process to know whether these tools are proportionate to the threat, whether they filter too much content, or whether they discriminate against certain groups, she says.

Two mystery litigants citing privacy concerns are making a last-ditch bid to keep secret some details in a lawsuit stemming from wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein’s history of paying underage girls for sex.

Just prior to a court-imposed deadline Tuesday, two anonymous individuals surfaced to object to the unsealing of a key lower-court ruling in the case, as well as various submissions by the parties.

Both people filed their complaints in the New York-based 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, which is overseeing the case. The two people said they could face unwarranted speculation and embarrassment if the court makes public records from the suit, in which Virginia Giuffre, an alleged Epstein victim, accused longtime Epstein friend Ghislaine Maxwell of engaging in sex trafficking by facilitating his sexual encounters with teenage girls. Maxwell has denied the charges.

Rescue teams in Mozambique are struggling to reach the thousands of people stranded on roofs and in trees and urgently need more helicopters and boats as post-cyclone flood waters continue to rise.

Rescue workers, military personnel and volunteers are rushing to save thousands of Mozambicans before flood levels rise further, but with four helicopters, a handful of boats and extremely difficult conditions, have only been able to save about 413 so far.

“I don’t even know if we’ve made a dent. There are just so many people. The scale is huge. We’re busy doing the best we can,” said Travis Trower from Rescue South Africa, adding that a lot of people had been washed away but those still alive, whom he had seen from helicopter flights, were in a very bad state.

More than 400 sq kilometres (150 sq miles) in the region are flooded, according to satellite images taken by the EU, and in some places the water is six metres (19ft) deep. At least 600,000 people are affected, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), ranging from those whose lives are in immediate danger to those who need other kinds of aid.

About 40 percent of the District’s lower-income neighborhoods experienced gentrification between 2000 and 2013, giving the city the greatest “intensity of gentrification” of any in the country, according to a studyreleased Tuesday by the National Community Reinvestment Coalition.

The District also saw the most African American residents — more than 20,000 — displaced from their neighborhoods during that time, mostly by affluent, white newcomers, researchers said. The District and Philadelphia were most “notable” for displacements of black residents, while Denver and Austin had the most Hispanic residents move. Nationwide, nearly 111,000 African Americans and more than 24,000 Hispanics moved out of gentrifying neighborhoods, the study found.

In an essay accompanying the study, Sabiyha Prince of Empower DC said the city “rolled out the proverbial red carpet” for tens of thousands of new residents in the past five years. But the new dog parks, bike lanes, condominiums and pricey restaurants that followed, she said, are not viewed as improvements by long-term residents, who can feel isolated because of losing neighbors, social networks and local businesses. Prince, an anthropologist, said longtime Washingtonians tell stories of “alienation and vulnerability in the nation’s capital.”